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Photo courtesy The Eggplant. Some rights reserved.

Along with a zillion other people, I have some lower back problems, which means — among many other things — mattresses are a relevant issue in my life, which brings us to this story. This week, Kathy Gersch explores what breaking out of the hierarchy looks like in practice, and this innovation comes from a surprising place: Sealy, the mattress company.

Can adding 50% more labor cost and 20% more material cost actually increase sales of a stagnating product in a highly competitive luxury market space? The mattress company, Sealy, proved that it can.

How did they do it? They created a different kind of cross-functional team. In the fast-moving consumer space, this type of team only happens when people are pulled out of the traditional hierarchical management structure. Sealy was able to remove people from their silos and create a team ready to execute with speed and acceleration — one where no one had to wait for requests and approvals to travel through the hierarchy, and where all members were completely aligned and motivated around a single goal. In this rare type of complete alignment, all ideas about all facets of the product are voiced and receive equal consideration from the group. In this example, the collaborating Sealy marketing manager and engineer felt free to voice their ideas about anything — including aspects of the other's discipline — without fear.

The end result: customers flocked to the new product, breaking previous sales records.

What were the key takeaways that enabled this group to achieve success?

1.Diverse cross-functionality. In this case, the diversity of the team was a key asset. No matter how many people are on your team, they must each add a distinctively valuable expertise or perspective, and exhibit the leadership traits needed to represent their ideas, regardless of rank.

3.Empowerment to drive the change. Tasked with a huge job involving a flagship product is an enormous challenge for this type of team. They were empowered by this task, as well as by being given access to resources such as IDEO.

4. Passionate conviction to achieve the goal. When members are assigned to a cross-functional team based solely on rank or title, many times these people do not bring the key element required for team success: a passion for the goal that is more powerful than their instinct to remain within their silo and the ability to place the shared goal ahead of their departmental priorities.

5.Support to remove barriers. This team had the support of leadership to ignore traditional limits, like keeping costs down and not wasting time with prototyping. This gave the team freedom to explore any possibility — even counter-intuitive ones — and produce a successful result.

The biggest win wasn’t the new mattress design. It was that Sealy's leadership learned a new way to arrange their organization, enabling it to break through the barriers their people hit every day within the hierarchy and within their silo walls. Not only that, but they were able to do what only 5% of organizations do with their strategy implementations: execute quickly, with an open directive, and come out with a successful result. Now, if Sealy can apply this experience to their organization as a whole, creating a “strategic network” in addition to their traditional organizational structure, they’ll be able to take on any future corporate challenge.